Once, there was a red line. Its name was Meir Kahane.

For readers unfamiliar with Kahane: Meir Kahane was a Brooklyn-born rabbi and founder of Kach, a racist, ultranationalist movement that called for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and a Jewish state governed by religious law. After his assassination in 1990, Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai (“Kahane Lives”), were designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the United States—a status they retained until 2022, when the State Department revoked it, citing changed circumstances and the groups’ inactivity.

When Kahane took the Knesset podium in the 1980s, lawmakers would leave the chamber. Likud members joined the boycott. Yitzhak Shamir was one of the Likud figures leading it, even during Menachem Begin’s tenure as prime minister. The right of that era understood that not everyone to its right was a legitimate political partner. One could be nationalist and hawkish, committed to Greater Israel, and still tell Kahane and his racism: this far, and no further.

Four decades later, Benjamin Netanyahu—the prime minister facing criminal charges—has gradually erased that red line altogether.

The process Likud has undergone in recent years is not merely a shift further right. Parties change their positions, electorates move right and left, and political camps redraw their boundaries. What happened here was more profound: the erasure of the very line that the mainstream right itself drew between Kahanism and itself.

Only five years ago, Netanyahu knew exactly where the line lay

On February 15, 2021, during the campaign for the 24th Knesset, Channel 12 News anchor Yonit Levi asked Netanyahu whether Itamar Ben Gvir would be a minister in his government.

“No. He will not be in the government at all,” Netanyahu replied.

Asked whether Ben Gvir was fit to serve as a minister, Netanyahu said: “In my view, no. Not in my government.”

Levi asked why. Netanyahu tried to evade the question, but she pressed him, listing Ben Gvir’s extreme positions: his opposition to Arab and Jewish women giving birth alongside one another, his homophobia and his protests against Jerusalem Pride parades.

Netanyahu cut her off: “There, you have your answer. You have your answer as to why he will not be a minister or chair a Knesset committee. What can I do? Ben Gvir’s positions are not mine.”

Netanyahu interview: Ben Gvir Will Not Be in My Government or Chair a Knesset Committee 

This is a moment worth recalling today.

The Netanyahu of 2021 did not pretend not to know who Ben Gvir was. When Yonit Levi described his positions, he did not dispute her account; he accepted it as the reason Ben Gvir was unfit to serve in an Israeli government. By his own account, he had a fundamental ideological objection to Ben Gvir at the time.

By late 2022, however, Netanyahu no longer had any such objection. Just 22 months after his remarks on Channel 12, he appointed the same Ben Gvir, with the same views, not merely to the cabinet but as national security minister, responsible for the police. Before the appointment, Netanyahu did not claim that Ben Gvir’s positions had changed, or that describing them as racist and homophobic was a smear invented by the left or the media.

Ben Gvir did not undergo an ideological transformation over that period. A longtime Kahanist activist, he once kept a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinian worshippers in Hebron in 1994.

On October 11, 1995—three weeks before Rabin’s assassination—the 19-year-old Ben Gvir appeared on television holding a Cadillac emblem ripped from Rabin’s car and declared: “Just like we got to this emblem, we can get to Rabin.”

His subsequent efforts to present himself as having left that extremism behind were cosmetic and unconvincing. As late as November 2022, he attended the annual memorial event for Kahane. He did not renounce Kahanism or reinvent himself as a liberal.

Netanyahu was the one who changed. More precisely, he subordinated the standard of fitness for office that he himself had set to his political and personal needs, against the backdrop of his criminal trial.

Netanyahu’s reversal was absolute. He did not portray Ben Gvir as a pariah admitted into government only by force of circumstances, or as someone whose company he himself avoided. This was not a temporary normalization imposed by political survival, but a full and ongoing legitimization. Netanyahu understood that, for the foreseeable future, he could not afford to allow a major party to Likud’s right to remain beyond the pale of coalition politics.

Ben Gvir did not return inside the red line. Netanyahu simply erased it.

The appointment, however, was only one stage in a broader process of legitimizing Kahanism—a process Netanyahu set in motion and continues to drive.

In the preceding election cycles, Netanyahu repeatedly pushed for electoral alliances designed to ensure that Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) candidates crossed the electoral threshold. He pressured the parties, brokered deals between them and transformed the question of the legitimacy of Kahane’s political heirs from a matter of principle into a simple calculation: how many votes would be wasted if they failed to cross the threshold?

The Kahanist Pandora’s Box Has Been Opened

Once racism ceases to be a moral question and becomes a matter of vote management, the road to legitimizing it is paved. First, Otzma Yehudit is helped across the electoral threshold. Then it becomes a natural partner in the bloc, then in the coalition, and then in government. Today, it is already difficult to tell where Otzma Yehudit ends and Likud begins.

Almog Cohen is perhaps the clearest illustration of where this process has led.

Cohen was elected to the Knesset on Otzma Yehudit’s ticket. Ahead of the upcoming election, he sought to move to Likud. Netanyahu personally stepped in to make it possible, granting Cohen a waiver of the party’s membership requirement so that he could run in its primaries. Cohen went on to place eighth on Likud’s national list.

Anyone who still sees Cohen as an exceptional case—a candidate whose politics are not defined by racism and whose move to Likud therefore does not demonstrate the blurring of boundaries—should recall a television investigation aired ahead of the election to the 25th Knesset. It revealed a recording in which Cohen told party activists that he held more extreme views than Baruch Marzel, an extremist who has repeatedly been barred from running for the Knesset and is sanctioned by the European Union. Cohen described the party’s moderated messaging as a “Trojan horse” tactic intended to normalize the party and its extremist candidates in the public eye.

Channel 13 Investigation into Almog Cohen: “Next to me, Baruch Marzel is a leftist.”

In other words, the same Cohen who described himself as more extreme than Baruch Marzel, and who entered the Knesset through a Kahanist party, is no longer merely a coalition partner Likud had to accept in order to secure a majority of 61. He is integral to Likud and one of the highest-ranked candidates on its slate.

At the same time, it has become clear that the process Netanyahu set in motion has succeeded so thoroughly that transfers can now happen in the other direction as well.

Tally Gotliv, elected to the Knesset on Likud’s ticket, now holds the second spot on Otzma Yehudit’s slate, directly below Ben Gvir. May Golan, Likud’s minister for social equality, was relegated to a nonviable place in the party’s primaries. Her serious talks about joining Otzma Yehudit were treated as entirely natural.

Minister Golan: “There Are Not Many Ideological Differences Between Otzma Yehudit and Likud”; KM Vaturi: Kahane was right about many things

And that is precisely the point.

Even in the 25th Knesset, the extreme, racist Kahanist agenda had other allies within Likud. One might regard them as a kind of Trojan horse—not necessarily figures dispatched to the ruling party on orders from above, but politicians who found a home there in a Kahanist ideological climate fostered by the party’s leadership. That climate is itself a product of the normalization of racism Netanyahu promoted.

When a politician can move from Otzma Yehudit to Likud, and Likud politicians can move in the other direction, with scarcely any need for an ideological conversion, it becomes clear that the boundary between the two parties no longer exists.

The question now is whether these are truly separate parties or merely two branches—different shades of the same racist-Kahanist political space—trading personnel between them. Gotliv and Golan are not the only Likud politicians who could, under different political circumstances, move to Otzma Yehudit without the move being seen as an ideological conversion. Nissim Vaturi, Ofir Katz and Avichai Boaron could be added to that list.

In November 2025, Likud MK Nissim Vaturi took the Knesset podium and declared: “Rabbi Kahane was right about many things that the people of Israel got wrong, and Likud leaders got wrong too.”

It is hard to imagine a clearer illustration. While Likud leaders in the 1980s left the chamber when Kahane rose to speak, a Likud MK in 2025 took that same podium to declare that those Likud leaders had been wrong and Kahane had been right.

This is not merely a change of style. It is a wholesale replacement of Likud’s identity, values and moral compass.

The Likud of Begin and Shamir could be very right-wing without being Kahanist. It understood that a chasm separated nationalism from racism. Netanyahu’s Likud has gradually filled in that chasm, until one can almost cross it without noticing.

Yet the road to the mainstream that Netanyahu has paved may turn against Likud in the coming election. Normalizing Ben Gvir is not a one-way street, and Ben Gvir himself is a populist with formidable media skills. The legitimacy Netanyahu bestowed on him among Likud voters could leave Likud with fewer than 20 seats: Likud supporters who never imagined voting for a Kahane Chai party may now see it as a conceivable choice.

In legitimizing Ben Gvir, Netanyahu also handed him a straw with which to siphon off Knesset seats. Likud may well be the party from which this Kahanist siphons them.

Netanyahu did not invent Kahanism, of course, and he is not responsible for Ben Gvir’s views. His historical responsibility lies elsewhere: he turned what the Israeli right had cast out for decades into a legitimate, useful and ultimately central part of his own camp. Netanyahu, a man adept at branding others “far left” or otherwise labeling them “extremist,” has turned Likud into a far-right party marked by unmistakable racist-Kahanist currents. Only its image as relatively moderate has survived—thanks to him.

And he did it gradually.

That is why the stories of Almog Cohen, Tally Gotliv and May Golan are not, as presented in the media, mere election-season gossip about a transfer market between two slates. They are, at least for now, the latest stage in a political process with long-term consequences.

Welcome to the new intersection of Israel’s right:

Likud, Corner of Kahane Chai.

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This article was originally published in Hebrew by Shakuf on September 3, 2026.

About Shakuf: Shakuf is an independent news outlet that covers the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. It is part of Independent Press, Israel’s largest independent-media group, which also includes The Seventh Eye and The Hottest Place in Hell.